Riley’s car smells like stale coffee and winter air.
She parks in the gravel lot above the docks, the tires crunching over frozen ruts. Below us, the harbor sits in a bruise-colored bowl of sky, boats bobbing at their moorings, strings of leftover parade lights still clinging to masts. The Mercer Foundation banners flap along the boardwalk, the crest’s abstract waves rippling like they own the water.
“You sure you want to do this here?” Riley asks.
The heater wheezes, pushing out air that’s warm but dry, tinged with dust. I rub my hands together, then press my palms against my jeans, trying to get rid of the tremor.
“Neutral ground,” I say. “Not the estate. Not your office. Just… here.”
“Halfway between a yacht and a motel,” she mutters. “Perfect metaphor for this town.”
A gull screams somewhere overhead. The sound slices through the closed windows, high and ragged. I unlock my phone and the screen lights up, bathing my fingers in cold blue.
There’s the email: Your DNA Results Are Ready.
My thumb hovers above it. My pulse thuds in my throat, heavy enough that I taste metal.
“You wanna wait?” Riley asks quietly. “We don’t have to do this today.”
“I can’t go back to that house knowing this is sitting in my inbox,” I say. “I’ll explode.”
She exhales, long and slow, fogging the glass. “Then open it,” she says. “Let’s let the grenade go off where we can see the shrapnel.”
I tap the email. The logo loads—cheerful helix, rounded font, a rainbow of genealogy promises. My hands shake so hard I almost drop the phone.
“Here,” Riley says, reaching out. “I’ll hold it. You drive.”
I snort, a short, ugly sound. “No one is driving anywhere.”
She curls her hand around mine instead, steadying the phone between us. Her palm is rougher than I expect, the way people’s are when they live on keyboards and paper and never enough sleep.
We sign in, step through the two-factor code she made me set up. The site loads in sections. Health markers, ancestry, relatives.
Relatives.
“Start with mine,” she says quickly, before I can overthink it. “If you see something that looks like bad news, give me a heads-up before you say anything out loud, okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
I swipe to her profile. The harbor outside blurs in my peripheral vision, the boats and the donor banners and the distant hospital wing flattening into color. All my focus funnels into the little white box that reads Close Family & Parent/Child Matches (1).
One.
My lungs seize.
I tap the box.
A name appears, black font on white. For a second the letters don’t make sense. Then they rearrange themselves into someone I know better than my own.
Robert Mercer — Parent/Child Match — 50% shared DNA.
There’s a percentage below, something in the high ninety-nines, a little strip of colored bars. My brain refuses to do the math, because there’s no math left to do.
“Well?” Riley asks. “Cousin? Uncle? Lottery winner who shares my taste in podcasts?”
My voice won’t work. I tilt the screen toward her.
Her eyes skim the name, then stop. Color drains from her face so fast I feel it, like someone opened a window and pulled the heat out of the car.
“No,” she says.
The word is a breath, not a denial. She grabs the phone, zooms in, reads the line three times, four, as if the letters will eventually rearrange themselves into imagined, error, try again later.
“Parent,” she whispers. “It says parent.”
“Parent or child,” I manage. “But he’d have to be—”
“Too old to be my kid, yeah,” she says, voice detached. “Jesus.”
She scrolls, scanning the explanation box. “‘This relationship is most likely parent-child,’” she reads aloud. “‘We detect approximately fifty percent shared DNA and long segments.’”
Her fingers shake now too, the screen jittering in her grip. A horn blares down on the road, making both of us flinch.
“It could be wrong,” I say, because someone has to say it. “They make mistakes.”
She barks out a laugh. “Not this kind,” she says. “False positives at this level are… no. This is the one thing I trust these people on. They know who shares half my genome.”
The wind gusts off the water and rattles the car. Somewhere toward town, a siren rises and falls, distant, swallowed quickly by the hill that carries the hospital.
“Scroll down,” I say gently. “Check the other close matches.”
She does. The site lists second cousins, third cousins, little clusters of strangers with usernames and grayed-out faces. No Daniel. No Evelyn. No Lydia, of course.
At the bottom of the close-family section, there’s a line of text: Second parent not in database.
Riley sees it the same time I do. Her jaw tightens.
“No Evelyn,” she says. “No Hart-Mercer, no Hart, no nothing. Either she never spat in a tube, or she’s not the one who gave me half this mess.”
“Your father is Robert,” I say. The words feel thick and unreal. “That trust document—‘Second Daughter Beneficiary’—that’s you.”
She leans back against the seat, the leather squeaking. Her head thumps gently against the headrest. For a moment she just stares at the roof, eyes wide, pupils blown.
“Of course it is,” she says finally. “Of course I’m the one she buried.”
“Riley—”
“He knew something,” she cuts in. “He had to. You don’t sign a trust labeled ‘Second Daughter’ by accident.”
I picture Robert’s hands, the tremor in them when he poured brandy by the fire, the way he looked at Lydia’s portrait and somewhere past it, like chasing a ghost only he could see.
The harbor will keep bobbing; Harbor Glen will keep cataloging who rides which yacht. The donor walls at the hospital will keep their neat rows of names. A new row, if this ever comes out, with Riley’s name wedged where a lie used to sit.
“We’ll figure out what he knew,” I say. “Later. Right now, we finish reading.”
She swipes back to the main page, jaw clenched. “Your turn,” she says. “Let’s see whether I should send you a ‘welcome to the family’ card or a ‘sorry for your loss’ basket.”
I don’t laugh. Neither does she.
I switch to my profile. The same tabs appear, the same promise of ancestry and health and relational webbing. The car hums around us: engine idling, heater sighing, one of the vents whistling faintly through a loose seam.
Relatives: Close Family & Parent/Child Matches (1).
For a blink of a second, hope spikes hot and vicious in my chest. One. Maybe—
I tap.
A name pops up. Not Mercer. Not Hart.
Maria Cole — Parent/Child Match — 49.7% shared DNA.
I swallow. “Well,” I say. “That tracks.”
“Your mom,” Riley says, reading over my shoulder. “So she’s… her.”
“Looks like it,” I say. My throat tightens on the words. My mother’s name on a screen of colored bars and segments, boiled down to data points. No other close matches above second cousin.
Riley leans closer. “Scroll,” she says. “Sometimes they flag other likely relationships. Half-siblings, that sort of thing.”
I do. The list that follows is a scatter of third cousins and “possible relatives.” Nobody obvious, nobody screaming you belong here.
“No Mercers,” I say.
“Which means you’re not Robert’s kid and not Daniel’s half-anything,” she says. “At least not in this database.”
I nod, numb. “So I didn’t marry my secret brother,” I say, trying for levity that lands flat between us.
“Relief,” she says. “Yay for not starring in a tabloid horror show.”
I stare at the screen a second longer. Mixed with the relief is something heavier, an ache down behind my ribs. All those tiny fantasies my brain built without permission—shared nose, shared stubbornness, some genetic reason I ended up in that house. Gone.
“Scroll further,” Riley says. “There’s more.”
Below the relative list, another box waits: Additional Findings (Hospital Cross-Reference).
My stomach drops. “What is that?”
“That’s the part where my friend at the lab got creative,” she says quietly. “Remember those blood spots they take from newborn heels? Some hospitals in this network store anonymized genotypes. They set up a legitimate research protocol to link certain adult samples back to birth facilities. Your kit hit their age window and region.”
“You’re telling me they can see which hospital I came from,” I say.
“And sometimes which recorded mother you matched,” she says. “Click it.”
My finger shakes so hard I mis-tap twice before landing on the tiny arrow. The box expands.
Likely birth facility: Harbor Glen Memorial Hospital.
I knew that already, but seeing it in black text makes my throat burn.
Below it, another line:
Highest maternal match in birth-cohort database (99.4% probability): Elena Suarez, DOB 1970, Delivery Date: 03/14, Location: Harbor Glen Memorial Hospital, Maternity Wing B.
My vision tunnels.
“That’s not my mother,” I whisper.
Riley’s hand clamps around my wrist. “Let me see.”
I pass her the phone. The plastic case scrapes against my palm, grounding and painful.
She scans the entry, lips moving as she rereads the name. “You said your mom’s name is—”
“Maria Cole,” I say. “Not Suarez. Not Elena. Her birthday is in August. She never changed her name.”
The weight of the car presses down. Outside, the hospital glows on the hill, glass and steel a little too bright against the dull sky. The air from the vents smells faintly singed, like the heater is working harder than it should.
“Date of birth,” Riley says slowly. “Year.”
“Mine?” I ask.
“Yours,” she says.
I give it to her. She glances between me and the screen, some calculation ticking behind her eyes.
“Delivery date March fourteenth,” she reads. “That’s… earlier than you were told, right?”
“I was supposed to be an April baby,” I say, the words scraping their way out. “Mom always said I was overdue. She used to joke about how I made her miss the first nice weather.”
Riley’s eyes flick up to the hospital again, then back down. “Hannah,” she says, voice low. “This isn’t a typo.”
“It could be,” I insist. “Data entry screw-up. Wrong mother, wrong baby. They mix things up all the time. Have you seen some of the charts in that place?”
She shakes her head. “This isn’t some handwritten file in a damp basement,” she says. “This is a genetic match. Ninety-nine point four percent. The system is saying the DNA you mailed in belongs to someone born in that hospital, that week, to this woman.”
“So what does that make Maria?” I ask. “A stranger who happened to raise me?”
The steering wheel creaks under Riley’s grip. “It makes her the person who showed up on every permission slip,” she says. “But biologically? This is your birth mother.”
The words slam into me. Birth mother. The car is too small, the air too thin. I crack the window an inch, and cold sea air knifes in, carrying salt and woodsmoke from town and the distant, bitter tang that always reminds me of disinfectant from the hill.
The hospital stands over Harbor Glen like a second cliff, its windows bright eyes watching the docks, the back roads, the country club roofs. The Mercer crest gleams on the foundation wing, the abstract wave a promise and a warning.
“So I’m not a Mercer,” I say, staring at that crest. “Not the second daughter, not anything.”
“You’re ‘Case 14B,’” Riley says softly. “Or tied to her. Whatever they did with that baby, they built your life on the same assembly line.”
I laugh, short and raw. “Great. I’m not the stolen heir. I’m just another product.”
Her head snaps toward me. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” I ask.
“Shrink what happened to you because it doesn’t fit the fairy-tale version,” she says. “This system rewrote your origin story to make paperwork line up. That’s not ‘just’ anything.”
I run my thumb over the edge of the phone, the metal cold against my skin. On the screen, Elena Suarez stares back in plain black letters. No photo, no story. Just a name that should have been on every form I ever signed and never was.
“And you?” I say. “You’re the one tied by blood to that trust. To this town’s royalty.”
She snorts, but her eyes are wet. “Royalty,” she says. “That would’ve been nice when I was sharing shampoo with six girls in a group home.”
We sit in silence for a moment, listening to the dull slap of water against wood below, the tick of the engine, the faint electronic buzz of the phone between us.
“I thought I wanted this,” she says finally. “Proof I belonged somewhere. That I wasn’t just a glitch. Now I can already hear Evelyn spinning: ‘Troubled young woman attacks grieving family for money.’”
“She’s going to fight this,” I say. “Every inch of it. She’ll question the lab, the chain of custody, your motives.”
“And she’ll have her therapist’s little notes ready for when you back me up,” Riley says. “‘Hannah has a history of mistrust.’ ‘Hannah projects childhood abandonment onto the family.’”
“She can call me unstable all she wants,” I say. “This is not in my head. You have fifty percent of Robert’s DNA. I have ninety-nine percent of some woman none of us have ever met. That hospital is the only constant.”
Riley nods slowly. “Which means this isn’t just about a will anymore,” she says. “This is malpractice on a human scale. Identity theft with bassinets.”
Another boat horn echoes across the water, low and mournful. The lights from the cliffside mansions flicker on one by one, tiny, curated constellations. People up there are pouring wine, glancing at donor walls, maybe planning next year’s Light the Harbor parade.
“You could walk away,” Riley says suddenly. “You’re not tied to them by blood. You could take this as your exit and never look back.”
I stare at the hospital, at the crest on the foundation wing, at the reflection of it doubled in the water.
“I married their son,” I say. “I lived in their house. I walked past that wall of fake ‘success stories’ while kids who never got their happy ending fell through the cracks. Blood or not, my life is wired into what they built.”
“That’s not your fault,” she says.
“No,” I say. “But what I do with it is.”
She lets out a breath, eyes closing briefly. When she opens them again, something steadier sits there, a hard, bright line.
“So what are we?” she asks. “If we’re not sisters.”
The question hangs between us, heavier than a label. Harbor Glen below ticks on, unaware.
“We’re the glitch in their system,” I say. “The proof the story doesn’t hold.”
I reach across the console and take her hand, threading my fingers through hers. Her grip tightens, bones pressing against bones.
“You’re his daughter,” I say. “The one they tried to erase. That trust is yours, whether we ever touch the money or not. And I am not going to let them swallow you a second time.”
Her eyes shine, but she doesn’t look away. “You realize what you’re saying,” she says. “This isn’t poking around in foundation archives anymore. This is war over a legacy, and they have every weapon.”
“Then we stop pretending this is anything else,” I answer. “We stop wondering if we’re overreacting and start planning for when they hit back.”
The phone buzzes again with some automated tip about “exploring my genetic communities.” I swipe the notification away.
In the distance, a yacht pulls away from a private dock, cutting a smooth path through the water. I watch the wake spread and break against the pilings, tiny waves slapping wood in uneven rhythms.
“The question isn’t whether Evelyn will come for us once she knows,” I say. “It’s what we hit first—her reputation, her bank accounts, or her illusions about who counts as family.”
Riley squeezes my hand once, sharp.
“Then we’d better decide fast,” she says. “Before she decides for us.”